Geert Bevin

CTO, Uwyn bvba/sprl

Profile

Technical skills

Work experience

CTO, Uwyn, 2002 - present

Company founder and active CEO/CTO

Founded this company to specialize in dynamic web applications, rich internet applications, web 2.0, platform-independent programs and interoperable web-services. Most of the projects leverage the RIFE web application framework or OpenLaszlo. These are the most significant achievements:

• Delivered a top to bottom solution for one of the largest online US retailers, allowing them to create innovative rich media customer interactions from within their familiar content creation tools. This provides exciting new features for tenths of million customers, making their shopping experience more pleasant and engaging while still presenting the information in a clean and elegant way. The details of this solution are confidential. However, I can arrange for a private demonstration and an architectural overview.
• Long-term collaboration with Magnet Magazines (de Persgroep) for the creation, maintenance and development of a modern content-managed website for all their magazines, with a focus on e-commerce and community building. A general suite of features has been developed to be able to cherry-pick and customize the needs of every individual site with limited additional investments.
• Development, support and maintenance for Proximus of high-performance modular internet, intranet and extranet customer relation management tools. The solution integrates with the internal business processes and all information is handled and stored in a highly secure manner.
• Analysis and development for Paratel of a platform-independent desktop application for the visual creation of MMS messages with automatic handling of different target phones and size limitations. Through a web-service, customers are able to send their messages in batch after having designed them locally.
• Creation of Bla-bla List, an open-source, secure, simple and sharable to-do list Rich Internet Application. It runs as a Web 2.0 service inside a browser without requiring any installation. Users are able to sign up in a matter of seconds and access their to-do lists from anywhere with internet access.
• Analysis, refactoring and extension for de Persgroep of a custom back-office e-commerce application. It has been dissociated from presentation logic and is provided as a generic service oriented application that can easily be integrated in partner sites.
• Platform-independent fat client creation for Greenpeace Belgium for multi-user contact and customer relationship management. The server-side architecture is service-oriented and fully decoupled.
• Consultancy for Greenpeace Belgium to migrate their older information infrastructures to newer technologies, including conversion and handling of existing data and content.

The details of other projects are available on our company website:

• http://uwyn.com/products
• http://uwyn.com/showcases

CTO, the Leaf, 2001

Company founder and CTO

• Design, analysis and development for Ems-Taxipost of a standalone multi-platform application that allowed customers to easily create, manage and print dispatch notes in a visual and intuitive manner.
• Creation of an automated online contest management and participation tool for l'Echo de la Bourse. Through the website, readers had the opportunity to answer daily and weekly questionnaires. The redaction of l'Echo had access to a complete multi-user role-dependent intranet application, for the organization of the event.

Independent developer, 1997 - 2001

Various projects as lead developer, consultant or project manager.

• Analysis and development of a generic solution for Planet Internet to provide back-end features such as automatic page authentication, user and group management, handling of JSP trails and breadcrums, scheduling of maintenance events, fault-tolerant database classes and localization.
• I-Skin was a realtime 3D installation that had been created for the exhibition 'Avignon, ville de beauté'. Visitors immersed themselves in a high-speed tunnel of images and intuitively selected images according to their beauty preferences. Every image had been classified according to its architectural, fashion or body characteristics. During the image selection, these characteristics performed transformations on the basic I-Skin, invoking changes in form, texture, color, transparency and internal structure. At the end, the visitor had created a virtual representation of his/her beauty tendencies and was plunged into the inner structure of his/her personal I-Skin to experience a breathtaking ride through its inner structure, decorated with the selected images.
• DTD design and creation for The Reference of a communication protocol between a WAP gateway and other tiers in a complex architecture involving a leading Belgian bank, database vendor, telecom operator and portable phone manufacturer.

Software developer, Ubiquity, 1998 - 1999

Design and development of numerous internet / intranet database-driven websites and applications.

• 4Catalogs was a product catalog management system for print and web use. It was intended to allow the easy manipulation of product images and associated text fields (descriptions, prices, etc.). This data could be automatically formatted and gathered for inclusion in desktop publishing packages and for publication on a public website. The contents of the website were automatically updated at given intervals by synchronizing the local spool on the dial-up server with the remote web server.
• Teamcontrol offered intranet access to projects and related files through a regular web-browser. The basic system supported three categories of users : system administrators, project managers and end-users. Each user had his own access rights and adapted functionalities. Files were uniquely identified through a nomenclature, developed specifically for a customer's needs. The core front-end of the system was an easy to use interface to this nomenclature. The insurance of rigorously applied, unique filenames permitted the exact identification of each file in any scenario (exchange with customers, employees working at home, archive retrieval, system recovery, ... ).
• 4Docs allowed the definition of document authors and reviewers, associated to specific projects. A project was the sequence of versions of a document under joint construction. Authors posted initial versions of their work through the website, reviewers were notified and could suggest amendments until a new or final version was made. The preferred document format was PDF, allowing reviewers equipped with Acrobat Exchange to add Sticky Notes to the original document, and the author to collect and simultaneously display all comments over the original design. However, other document formats such as Microsoft Word were also supported at customer's discretion.
• At the request of, and under the coordination of public communications agency Strat&Com, a dynamic website was developed to help organize the practicalities for the Euro-Andean Forum (London, May 1998) and deliver background information on the Euro-Andean cooperation to EEC and Andean Community officials, journalists and businessmen (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela).
• Constructed Ubiquity's company website with DHTML, using multiple layers, relative positioning and transparent abstraction from browser differences. All text content were dynamically loaded from external HTML pages that could independently be modified and be centrally maintained. Additional information was contained in draggable 'pop-ups' to avoid page clutter and offered easy access to accessory information.

Software and internet developer, Full Motion-i, 1997 - 1998

Design and development of internet websites. Text conversion and encoding migration tool development.

• The full text of the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty text had to be put online both in English and Russian. The original document consisted of one MS Word 97 document. It had to be converted to separate HTML files with a consistent navigation system that takes advantage of the possibilities of the internet, correctly handling encoding conversion problems.

System operator and administrator, Maescopy, 1997

Operation and maintenance of a heterogeneous network (Windows / MacOs / Irix platforms). Lay-out and desktop publishing.

Sales account manager, Ingram Micro, 1996

Customer technical support and sales.

Open-source and personal projects

Interviews

Awards

Articles and books

Conferences Talks and Presentations

Education

• Mostly self-taught.
• Sint-Lucas, Brussel 1st and 2nd year of Architecture
• Jan-Van Ruusbroeckollege, LakenClassical (secondary scientific A) studies